By now if you attended or watched the Tuesday morning VMworld Keynote speech by Stephen Herrod you have heard of something called ThinApp Factory. But most of you are probably wondering what is this product? Is it a place where you can drop off install media and some elves package your applications and mail them back to you for work. Not exactly, but it is something that will assist you in the packaging of common applications.

I spoke with an End User Computing (EUC) specialist today and got some of the following details. The idea behind Thinapp Factory is an appliance that will auto package Thinapps for you. You will point it towards an MSI or install file for an application. For example the Firefox install file. Then Thinapp Factory will auto spin up and Virtual Machine (VM) and do the application packaging for you. It will then generate a Thinapp EXE package for you. Right now only EXE files are available but MSI packages will be coming as the product matures.

To start Thinapp Factory will be able to package applications that follow standard MSI sequencing standards. As additional applications are certified VMware will continue to add them to the Factory. So this only leaves applications that cannot be done easy for you to have to package manually.

One thing of note also the VMware person told me was that if you point Thinapp Factor at 6 applications to install it will auto spin up 6 separate VMs and package them individually for you. I look forward to hearing and seeing more on this product.

If you found out any more details about this drop the details in a comment below and share with others.

Brian is a VCDX5-DCV and a Sr. Tech Marketing Engineer at Nutanix and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status 6 years for 2016 - 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCP5-Iaas, VCP-Cloud, VCAP-DTD, VCAP5-DCD, VCAP5-DCA, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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It’s been kind of hard to keep up with all the releases from VMware lately. They have been on an absolute terror dropping updated products like crazy since vSphere 4.1 hit the streets. The latest to put smiles on the faces of VMware admins is ThinApp 4.6. One of the biggest new features in the new version is the ability to harvest IE6 from a clean Windows XP machine.

ThinApp 4.6 adds the ability to “Harvest” Internet Explorer 6 from an existing Windows XP instance.In the past, the process for creating an IE6 package with ThinApp was complex. It required capturing the IE6 install using a clean instance of Windows 2000 with its pre-IE6 native browser IE5 and performing an upgrade. If you captured on Windows 2000 using the IE6 download from Microsoft’s download page odds are you would not get all the latest security fixes and updates provided by Microsoft. Capturing using a Windows 2000 base also made capturing IE6 applications plug-ins a bit trickier, especially if the plug-ins only installs on XP+. With so many companies migrating to Windows 7 we knew this is a popular use case, so we’ve turned the process of capturing IE6 into a few clicks. ThinApp can now automatically “harvest” IE6 from of any Windows XP instance. This means you can use an XP instance that has the latest security fixes applied, and also capture any plug-ins you want in the same go!

There is also the ability to redirect URL’s from a native browser window to a Virtual browser, read the full article here.

Brian is a VCDX5-DCV and a Sr. Tech Marketing Engineer at Nutanix and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status 6 years for 2016 - 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCP5-Iaas, VCP-Cloud, VCAP-DTD, VCAP5-DCD, VCAP5-DCA, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design

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With the release of ThinApp 4.5 the wishes of many VMware lovers have been answered. This update provides support for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. With this release VMware is providing a Relink utility that will allow you to update existing packages to be able to run on Windows 7. As always VMware recommends that you capture your application on the oldest OS that you plan on using, for many with will be Windows XP.

Relink can be run against existing ThinApp packages in either .exe or .msi format and automatically upgrades them use the latest and greatest version of the ThinApp runtime and package format. Relink accepts wildcard filenames and can work in recursive mode to upgrade all packages located under some parent directory. Relink is very handy if you have packages without associated projects and you want to upgrade them to support Windows 7.

Other new features include faster installing .msi files, support for .msi files as large as 2 GB and the ability to use the system swap file to reduce disk I/O. You can read up on all the rest of the details on the ThinApp Blog.

Brian is a VCDX5-DCV and a Sr. Tech Marketing Engineer at Nutanix and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status 6 years for 2016 - 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCP5-Iaas, VCP-Cloud, VCAP-DTD, VCAP5-DCD, VCAP5-DCA, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design